Many individuals and businesses occasionally have a need for printed materials such as party invitations, announcements of special events, holiday cards, or any number of other items. Rather than settle for off-the-shelf, generic designs, many customers for these types of products wish to personalize the product by incorporating personal images into the product design, such as photographs of family members or other images of particular interest or relevance to the customer.
Some of these individuals and businesses turn to traditional sources such as a local print shop for assistance in preparing customized materials. As an alternative, many people today choose to prepare their own custom designs using a Web-based printing service site that offers users the ability to access the site from the user's home or office and design a personalized product using document design tools and services provided by the site. Printing services Web sites typically provide their customers with the ability to select a desired product template from variety of pre-designed templates, incorporate text and images to create a customized design, and then place an order for production and delivery of a desired quantity of the product.
Prior art online tools and techniques for incorporating user images into electronic designs generally fall into two broad categories. In some cases, the layout selected by the user for customization has been designed by the printing service provider to contain one or more defined image containers into which uploaded images will be placed. These image containers typically have fixed dimensions and a fixed position in the overall layout. Layouts with fixed image containers may not be satisfactory to some users. For example, the dimensions of the available image container may not be compatible with the aspect ratio of the image that the user would like to use.
Furthermore, templates with a predetermined number of image containers require the user to know in advance exactly how many images the user intends to use in the design and to select a template having the appropriate number of image containers. If a user were to design a product having two uploaded images and, upon review, decide that a design having three uploaded images would be preferable, the user typically has no easy way to add the additional image short of returning to the template selection step and choosing a different template designed to accept three uploaded images. The user may have to repeat text entries or reenter other customizations made to the first template, resulting in user delay and aggravation.
Another prior art technique for allowing a user to incorporate images into a product design is to initially place all user-provided images at a default size at the same default location. This technique places the burden of manually resizing and repositioning images in the design completely on the user. Many users may find the effort associated with making these modifications and adjustments to be time-consuming and frustrating.
Therefore, there is a need for a flexible electronic design editing and customization system that provides flexible template designs capable of automatically sizing and positioning user images.